Can Machines Make Moral Decisions?

Robots and machines decisions' are not always morally right.

It’s time for tech companies to focus on machine morality!

Robots and machines are making the right decisions; however, their choices are not always morally right. It’s time now to focus on machine morality! With machine learning being the center of attraction for companies like Microsoft to invest and research, machine learning’s growth and hunger to improve seems to be never-ending. A branch of artificial intelligence, machine learning is the process through which machines can learn from its users and focus on doing things that will eventually improve the current status of how processes operate, with the help of data analysis. Machine learning works on algorithms provided to them by their engineers. Machine learning applications across industries hold importance because of its ability to learn from the past information and suggest companies on what decision can be the best for them. Even though machines help people and businesses to make sound decisions, the moral aspect of decision making is what machines lack. Machine morality is an aspect that can help them in deciding what is right and what is wrong with a decision and not just focus on what’s the ideal decision in a situation. With machines being able to make decisions for improving businesses, machine morality can help in developing several situations across the globe. When machine morality gets implemented on a full scale, people and companies can expect machines to be dynamic and have a clear picture of what is morally correct.

What is Machine Morality?

By using AI and machine learning, researchers and pioneers leveraging ML have speculated an unprecedented era of machines that pose a threat to the existing human life. Stephen Hawking said in an interview given to BBC, “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” As machines learn from people and algorithms provided to them, teaching machine morality to traditional machine learning would require creating algorithms that can better assist machines with distinguishing between what is morally right and wrong. One of the reasons machine morality can improve machine learning is because of its ability to make a decision when being in a moral dilemma. Machine learning focuses on objective metrics that can assist them in making generic choices, but with machine morality, machines can make ethical decisions as those decisions are vastly based on gut feeling and are incredibly complicated as compared to those decisions made by machines on a daily basis. So basically, machine morality will only focus on improving machine learning and enabling it for making sound decisions.

What is the Future of Machine Morality?

Even after having differing opinions around machine learning and artificial intelligence, companies try to focus on keeping machines ethical and are always on the go to keep machines in use for noble purposes. In the future, machine morality can efficiently prove to be, for instance, elite babysitters taking care of children with having sound knowledge of what can be done to take adequate care of the child. For machines to become morally correct, programmers will have to make algorithms which are universally acceptable and can be said to be high on the moral terms. Machine morality is a concept that is yet far away and programmes have been initiated to keep AI and ML in good hands, but the pace at which it is progressing and growing is something that can be enough for organizations to start their preliminary research on the technology. We as humans lack moral knowledge when doing specific tasks.